This study analyzes the characteristics of Japan's Global Innovation Gateway for All (GIGA) school initiative, which promoted various educational outcomes through environmental changes that improved schools’ information and communications technology (ICT) during the COVID-19 period.
For this purpose, this literature review examines the theoretical understanding of the educational environment, the policy background of the GIGA school initiative, its main educational values, and the policy in practice, and analyzes these practices in Japan. As a result of this review, the GIGA school initiative was found to have the following characteristics. First, the GIGA school initiative embodies a policy of equally providing elementary, middle, and high school students each with a terminal they can use in all subjects. Second, the GIGA school initiative aims to improve the quality of the curriculum so that students can learn more deeply through research and cooperative learning while using tablets and cultivating terminal operation skills. Third, the GIGA school initiative is an educational program that promotes social skills to discover others, to help in the learning process, and to achieve common goals together through exchanges and cooperation through the use of the terminals. Through the above reorganization of the information environment, the GIGA school program aims to develop problem-solving abilities to efficiently and rationally utilize the information environment beyond the development of manipulative abilities for functions, and to develop the social abilities necessary to value others and live together.